Web Design in the Zoomable Age
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
From time to time I find myself making either myself or someone I know a simple website. Nothing too fancy, I have friends who get paid for that, but things i take pride in none the less. Web design, unlike print or tv is a medium where you truly don’t know how the end user will see your content. By this I mean, what browser are they using? Are they running a mac or pc? What gamma are they set to? And the biggie, what resolution are they running? You can design sites that will stretch or you can have a fixed width based on a common resolution like 1024×768, which still seems to be the majority of sites on the web I find. Flash seems to be going the way of the DoDo and not because of Apple but simply the lack of need. Technologies change very quickly online. Which brings me to my thought. I have and iPad and I love it. I use it as my primary computer actually. Since I got my iPad I find on a daily basis I need little more than it’s functionality. And while using the iPad’s true “killer app”, Safari, I realized how the web has to get a lot richer in depth of resolution to be effective on what are actually smaller screens. Not because they need to be sharp so that you can read it on a small page, the browser had tricks for that, but because you can zoom. I was just on FaceBook and I pinched in to read some text and I realized that the more I zoomed the worse the site looked on my tablet. So I tried it on my new iPhone 4 with it’s “retina display” and of course the same happened. So I went to handful of other sites to make sure this was a common issue and I found it to be so. I’m wondering what can really be done about this? Make site graphics at a much higher DPS (dots per inch) and increase their download size ten fold? Simply design for a much larger resolution that will alienate a lot of users? I’m not sure of the answer to this one but I see this as the same issue DVRs brought to TV/Film. When fanboys, like me, can pause and go frame by frame through a movie and pick out all the little mistakes in each frame it ruins the magic of the moving nature of moving pictures that is relied on to tell such fantastical stories. Now, zooming in on a button on some web page and seeing a bunch of jagged and fuzzy pixels isn’t as bad as say watching the single worst visual effect of all time in Star Wars: Episode 2 when Anakin floats a space pear over to Padme and she takes a bite out of it, which looks completely fake and horrible, but it’s annoying to me to think that the works I and/or much more talented people are doing are so easily made to look like garbage.